How Do You Communicate as a Woman in Academia?
It is interesting to consider that something that feels so innate to us as living beings - communication - comes with so much baggage from a social, cultural, and gendered perspective.
Even when I think about my experience as a play therapist, wherein play is the avenue for communication in children, there are gendered experiences in their ‘words’ (the toys) from colors, noises, animals, people, etc. There is much to be learned about gender differences in communication from a very young age.
For your letter, I think it’s important for us to start with the assumption that traditionally male language or communication style is professional.
Let’s start with defining what professional means: “A person engaged or belonging to a profession”. It’s not about standards or norms, it’s about a person and them working in a certain field. There’s nothing innately there that there is only “one” way to be professional by definition.
When realizing that is all it is, being professional, it becomes clear how culturally bound professionalism is. And therefore what style of communication is appropriate.
I once believed that adjusting to write emails in a similar style that I had seen praised by men was the way to help reduce the gender gap in workplace communication, but then someone framed my actions in a way that shifted my perspective completely.
They phrased it as something like ‘putting the expectations on persons socialized as women to change their behavior is like asking Black Americans to change their behavior to eliminate racism in the United States’. It’s asking the group being harmed by the systems set up against them to adjust to the system, rather than asking those who set up the system to contend with the harm they are causing. (I understand this to be a very imperfect example as there shouldn’t be a hierarchy to oppression and that sexism isn’t equally experienced by us all).
I hope it helps illustrate the point though, that it isn’t appropriate to ask a group to strive to behave like those who are have so much power over or oppress them in order to be successful or accepted in a space; it shouldn’t be the gold standard of behavior to match what has been harmful to you in order to succeed.
There is nothing inherently wrong with women’s communication styles.
Recognizing that there is an impact to others when asking them to do something (often deemed a women’s communication style), is not wrong.
Adding in signs of emotions through exclamation marks or emojis (another “marker” of women’s communication), is not wrong.
Acknowledging that other people’s schedules might not be able to accommodate our ask (yet again another marker), is not wrong.
Positioning a statement or opinion as your perspective, not the objective Truth, is not wrong. (I hope to have effective made my point by now)
Valuing individualism, machine level productivity, and outcomes at the expense of humanity is what is to blame here. (These types of behaviors or thoughts are typically associated with men, and even though we know those things have set up a system that makes people unhappy, unfulfilled, and unhealthy, we still want to value the behaviors that created that as “professional”? - make that make sense)
I recently went to a pitch practice session with investors at SXSW where the MC made a point to acknowledge that investors who happen to be women are still less prevalent to investors who happen to be male at these events.
And when the only woman in the room to identify herself as an investor, the MC asked if she wanted to say anything on stage. She looked surprised and declined.
The MC then said something along the lines of “women typically won’t get up on stage if they aren’t prepared or don’t have a specific speech thought out, whereas men will come up here and wing it”, and then he moved on to start the pitching slots. And I was so surprised by the awareness of a discrepancy in the behavior, but no integration on why that might be or how the environment could be more inclusive by making space for women at the end (so they might be able to sort out what they want to say or send out a little email ahead of the pitching time for the same reason). But no, just wanted to name it but not do anything to foster a more equitable environment.
I bring this up because it’s the same socialization gap in the email communication, and in both instances the default, and subsequently what women “should” change and subscribe to, is the male socialization of communication. That rather than that MC realizing men might just be wasting everyone’s time to hear themselves talk by winging it or seeing that there is an emotional and spacial awareness to not taking up time and space when there is nothing to say, it was just acknowledged in a joking matter. Even though it has real world impacts.
To come back to your question about my experience specifically in academia, I would say my communication style, which I think people would characterize as a “woman’s style”, was praised and celebrated during presentations, posters, and talks about my work.
It only came under fire during anonymous peer review when reviewers didn’t believe the accessibility of my writing was suitable for publication. And that is more a misalignment with our values about academia, like who is allowed to read research, than a specific communication style (although I do believe they’re linked).
Besides that, with people to value accessibility and getting research into the hands of those who can make use of it the most outside of the ivory tower, they praised my communication style (which I would characterize as playful, emotive, clear language, story-based) as engaging, thoughtful (both as in they could sense the care I put in but also in that it made them think about things differently), accessible, and even fun! To say an academic presentation is fun is fairly unheard of so I do take that as a win.
No one ever questioned my intelligence because I used exclamation marks or believed my results less because I showed pictures and told a story over presenting a graph or a jargon filled PowerPoint slide.
So while I do think the institution of academia has a lot of growth to do on this topic of communication styles - I was very fortunate to be in a research centre that was very embracing of different ways of presenting - there are definitely changes happening in other small spaces too.
Which I think can happen in the workplace too. But it requires examining our assumptions and the stories we tell ourselves of other people.
Like are students actually walking over your colleague or is she building rapport and trust with her students by allowing them to show up differently than is expected? Is your colleague actually unpleasant or is it hard to receive a different communication style from a woman (aka are we bringing in a story that a woman has to be likeable?)
Rather than shifting communication styles, what would it be like to hold different expectations for communication? Or valuing a certain type of communication differently? Or changing our expectations of behavior from women?
There is room for emojis to exist in the workplace, for a more collaborative communication style, for the devaluaing of an unemotional or unengaged email, for actual interdependence to show up between co-workers and displayed through communication.
But it would take all of us being intentional about how we communicate, how we judge other people for communicating, and what we would like to model to the people around us for how to communicate with us. And this is absolutely an instance where a ripple effect can happen from just one person in every office or research lab or family being thoughtful about how gender plays a role in communication.
See you next Sunday (thank you for excusing my unexplained absence last week as I was away with family)
Til next Sunday,
Dr. Sydney Conroy
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